Obsidian on good in-game choices: "do you shoot grandma or do you help her across the street?"

This is a good read by VG247 where they have conducted an interview with the main brain behind Obsidian who has revealed the way they approach in-game choices and to the degree in how nuanced they should be. Refreshing and informative and really makes me want to try New Vegas which I have been itching to do!

But what makes for a good video game choice according to those masters of the craft? Obsidian co-founder and CEO Feargus Urquhart knows a thing or two about crafting a strong moment of difficult player choice – so we put the question to him.

“It can be often too easy to make it about good and evil, right? So player choice needs to be legitimate and it needs to be about the player and not the designer,” Urquhart told me during a lengthy phone interview about Obsidian’s work in general. “I think that’s the biggest important thing. We’re at our best when we’re thinking about – okay, where is the player in the game? What do we feel that they’re thinking, what are they enjoying, and what are the type of players that they’re trying to be?“When we do that and give players choice based upon that… of course we can’t say you can be any type of player. You can’t be a serial killer and you can’t be a nun!

We still have to start with some sort of ground rules as far as what choices we’re giving the player to do… but it’s important to make those choices really make sense contextually within the quest and within the area of the game – it can’t just be do you shoot grandma or do you help her across the street. Now, fifteen, twenty years ago we were doing a lot more of that, but I think as time has gone on we’re understanding that better.”

“Hard choices are good, but they’re tiring,” added Urquhart. “I think this is the other thing – so if you give players a hard choice that’s hard for anybody unless you’re a complete nun or a complete psychopath… those are great to have but they have to be used sparingly. This is because the player comes out of it kind of emotionally drained and if you do that too much… it’s like playing Doom 3! It just ends up like, oh my god, stop, let me breathe. I think that’s an important part of it, and I think that’s what we focus on.

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